So for those of us who do not have a Mac, which is your favorite NLE application? Adobe Premier, Sony Vegas, Avid, etc. etc. ???

My personal favorite as of now is Sony Vegas, seems simple enough and great results.

Adobe Premiere! It's been the best experience I've ever had on all the NLE's I've been able to get my hands on. Plus it was the first NLE i ever learned on, so there's also the habit of it, but PPro is definitely one of the best. :)

EDIUS.
I shifted after 10 years of using premiere. Adobe made premier so hardware heavy after pre 1.5. EDIUS is fast and stable with HD. This assuming that you do your compositing on a compositing app like AE and not on your NLE.

Converted all 5 workstations in our facility from premiere to edius.
Their cards are stable too. # of our systems use 3 different cards from them, 2 reun software only. Still fast and stable.

Vegas is slick, but flawed.
Avid is not user friendly, but, loaded with great features and performance. Add on plugins are essential for more transitions and FX.
Edius is simple, fast, and has smooth playback. Edius is very low on features, compared to Avid and Vegas.

If you intend to go to film, or deal with any commercial film house, AVID is the only way to go. It is my personal choice.